Contracts a source of angst

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Further to our item last
week about an IT contract management company that we were told
had entered into the recruitment business, creating a possible
conflict of interest, we wish to elaborate.

First, we apologise for misnaming one of the big three contract
management companies as CXE when it is CXC Consultants
Exchange.

On the issue of another big contract management company, Entity
Solutions, allegedly becoming involved with recruitment through a
subsidiary called Marpeon, the subsidiary is not a recruitment
agency. It describes its activities as engagement management.

An account manager in the contract management business explained
that, in a nutshell, the subsidiary of Entity Solutions was in the
business of trying to get agreements with employers to manage the
affairs of their contractors.

There are a couple of issues here. First, the primary source of
clients for contract management firms are recruitment agencies.
Trying to deal directly with employers could be viewed as a way of
by-passing recruiters, which no doubt would make the recruiters
unhappy.

Therefore, forging business agreements with employers could be
viewed as a conflict of interest, which would no doubt make
contractors unhappy.

According to our source, there is a potential for a conflict of
interest if a contract management firm (or a subsidiary) does
business with employers.

"It can be a conflict of interest (for a contract management
company) to have a vendor relationship, but only if the option to
choose the contract manager is taken away from the contractor," our
source says.

Entity Solutions, one of the big three IT contractor management
companies in Australia, seems to have developed a bit of a juggling
act involving contractors, employers and recruitment agents.

We wait with interest to see how successful the company is in
keeping all the balls in the air.

Slack security courses

Talk to any big IT employer or recruiter and one of the skills
most in demand is security expertise.

Unfortunately, they face a couple of serious problems. Security
expertise is in worldwide short supply.

Incredibly, universities do not seem to pay much attention to
teaching IT security.

At a security summit in Melbourne last week, we caught up with
Rich Mogull, vice-president, information security and risk, at
research group Gartner.

Mr Mogull told us the lack of trained security people was
related to the scarcity of security courses, a reflection of the
newness of IT security as a strategic business issue.

"Our profession is being forced to mature because our businesses
rely more on technology and are putting core business processes on
internet-facing technology," Mr Mogull says.

"We need to make sure security works because the new cyber
crooks are no longer bored teenagers but organised crime. And they
have something to go after now, because there's real money to be
made."

According to Mr Mogull, the state of the IT security profession
is akin to the early days of the internet.

"The early web programmers weren't real programmers; they were
just some people who learned HTML and dabbled," he says.

"Most computer science degrees might have one mandatory class on
security, if you're lucky. "Therefore, we have computer programmers
and network engineers who don't learn security. No wonder there's a
shortage of trained security people."

Mr Mogull says the lack of IT security degree programs means
organisations looking for security expertise have to rely on
industry certifications such as CISSP (certified information system
security professional).

"CISSP is still the gold standard but some people can gain
certification in as little as five days," he says.

Given that several Australian academics attended the Gartner
summit, perhaps the message might sink in that teaching skills in
demand could be a way of boosting sagging computer science
enrolments.

Jobs aren't ads

A switched-on reader recently pointed out something that has
been on the minds of job seekers and industry watchers: the many
surveys from recruitment agencies about the IT jobs market may be
creating an impression there is an abundance of jobs available for
suitably skilled professionals.

Most of these surveys are based on the number of job ads
appearing in newspapers and on internet job boards, and this is a
problem.

The proliferation of cheap internet job advertising has led to
multiple postings of the same jobs on different boards.

Often a recruiter, or several recruiters, will post the same job
ad on multiple job boards.

We wonder whether the recruiters' IT jobs surveys are just
measuring how active the recruitment industry is in the cheap
internet advertising space segment of the market.